The Saints of Selma
This week marks the 55th anniversary of the crossing of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama when 600 non-violent civil rights marchers headed east out of Selma on U.S. Route 80 to raise awareness of the need for a federal Voting Rights act.
As Rev. William Barber II has said this week the March Continues. It is almost a waste of time to march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, AL for historical remembrance, if we don’t use their lessons in our present day.
It is my hope that this icon isn’t simply a reflection, but a symbol of purpose and action.
“The Christian community, therefore, is that community that freely becomes oppressed, because they know that Jesus himself has defined humanity's liberation in the context of what happens to the little ones. Christians join the cause of the oppressed in the fight for justice not because of some philosophical principle of "the Good" or because of a religious feeling of sympathy for people in prison. Sympathy does not change the structures of injustice. The authentic identity of Christians with the poor is found in the claim which the Jesus-encounter lays upon their own life-style, a claim that connects the word "Christian" with the liberation of the poor. Christians fight not for humanity in general but for themselves and out of their love for concrete human beings.” ~James H. Cone, “God of the Oppressed”
Those in the icon from left to right:
Front row: Rosa Parks, John Lewis, Martin Luther King Jr., Coretta Scott King, Ralph Abernathy. Middle Row: Amelia Boynton, Hosea Williams, James Forman, Jack Sidney-Snyder, Andrew Young. Back Row: James Orange, Archbishop Iakovos, Annie Lee Cooper, Diane Nash, C.T. Vivian
There are so many others who could have been in this icon.
Commissioned by Rev. Betsy Singleton- Snyder
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